Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Day 2 - Workflow

Today, our first session was about connecting with the Manaiakalani Pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share. 

The photo above taken from Kerry's slides today talks about the Manaiakalani programme being evidence based and highlights the use of and move from the analogue world to the digital world. It also highlights the importance of teacher effectiveness in accelerating learning outcomes. 

Throughout Kerry's presentation we were reminded of how important the teacher is and teacher actions are to the digital learning world and in accelerating the learning of our students. 

'Teacher actions are vital in engaging students in positive learning experiences'

The acronym RATE was also discussed which encompasses how teachers can be effective in their practice in the digital world of our learners. 

The four recommendations from WFRC are very valuable in my teaching practice. I am glad it was discussed in Kerry's session today. I have implement these recommendations in my practice to a certain degree but I know I can do more to be more effective in my practice. 

Last year as a CoL teacher, my inquiry was in Reading. Authentic texts to me is more than about students reading about topics of interest to them. It is about enabling students to have access to texts which challenges their current knowledge and enables them to read beyond what they know and how they read. The texts can be multimodal. As Aaron has shared wide and deep focus. A wide variety of reading texts with a narrow focus by zoning in to texts through discussions. 

The value of discussions are so crucial to how students learn. However, I feel there is a lot of work to be done in building an environment of inclusiveness where children feel their opinions are safe to be voiced and are valued. 

Again, I absolutely value the recommendations from WFRC and the data they provide for our cluster. 

Here are my learnings about the Google Apps we learnt about today:

Our last session today was about Taming our Tabs

I learnt today that you can delete the text when you are saving a tab to your Bookmarks and it leaves the icon to show on your Bookmarks bar. Great for saving space. I downloaded the One Tab extension and it is great. So much better to have a tidy work station/screen. I have yet to explore the other extensions Gerhard was presenting to us. 

For our create activity today, we had to create an invitation to a buddy from our discussion bubbles. My buddy was Elizabeth from Rawhiti school. We also had to choose a blog post from a selection of blog posts to share with our buddy during our Google Meet. I chose to share a blog post from Benjamin H at St Mary's in Gisborne. 

Here is a recording from my Google Meet with Elizabeth

In conclusion, it was another empowering day with the DFI team. Looking forward to our next session. For now, it is the putting what I have learnt in action.